Woman of Valor (30 page)

E. A. Ross of the University of Wisconsin, author of a popular diatribe against the unchecked reproduction of undesirables called
Standing Room Only
, admitted privately to Juliet Rublee in 1928 that some scientists were beginning to appreciate Margaret's work more and more, but he warned that posterity would judge her favorably only if she could demonstrate conclusively that providing clinical birth control services to women in need would save the world “from hordes of defectives.” This was obviously not her intent, and Ross's begrudging acceptance of the birth control program proved a hollow victory.

By the end of the 1920s, the reputation of eugenics had finally begun to decline. Its primitive and largely specious underpinnings in genetic science were under attack, and the rise of Fascism in Europe was calling attention to its most perverse implications. In 1928, the American Birth Control League rejected a proposal to join forces with the American Eugenics Society. Still, however tenuous the association, Margaret's relationship with eugenicism has since provided ammunition for opponents to her left and to her right politically, who have argued that contraception is nothing more than an instrument of social control. Her intense desire to have the support of the major secular thinkers of her day may have cost her far more than it was worth.
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Margaret's growing prominence through the 1920s thus by no means conferred respectability in all quarters. The proverbial lists compiled each year of the nation's most admired women did not include her name beside those of social reformers or suffragists whose reputations were far less controversial—women such as Jane Addams, Alice Paul, or Carrie Chapman Catt. Only a more adventuresome opinion maker, such as the popular columnist and birth control sympathizer Heywood Broun, dared to identify her in his personal accountings of the most glamorous and important Americans of 1922. Three years later, Broun's wife, the journalist Ruth Hale, also featured her as a brave and defiant clarion of free speech and free thinking in one of the first profiles that ran in the new and fashionable
New Yorker
magazine. “She has carried her crusade for birth control through from the time when simply to mention it was to invite imprisonment…,” Hale wrote. “She is, by far, now and from the beginning the most effective friend that the cause of birth control has ever had. To see her, one is astounded at her youth, at her prettiness, her gentleness, her mild, soft voice.”
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This flattering, if still somewhat flamboyant press, helped establish Margaret as a popular lecturer. Booked by agents in New York as “The International Champion of Birth Control”—or on another occasion as “the outstanding social warrior of the century”—she criss-crossed the country numerous times, addressing civic forums and women's groups and lending her support to the organization of local birth control federations. She also became a popular speaker on college campuses. In 1924, her appearance at Yale as the guest of the Divinity School was considered sufficiently newsworthy to merit coverage from
The New York Times
, yet the following year the administration at Tufts denied her the right to speak, forcing a liberal Unitarian minister in Somerville to provide his church as an alternative sponsor. Margaret cheerfully talked to a small group of adventuresome women who found their way there.

Whenever she went out on the circuit, Margaret addressed packed and enthusiastic audiences. Commercial lecturing on political and social topics was much in demand in America as an expanding economy provided the nation's growing middle class with leisure to explore new secular interests, but as yet without the competitive offerings of the talking film or the soon-to-be-universal medium of the radio. Margaret was a spirited advocate of her cause—an energetic and attractive figure who punctuated her remarks with moving human interest stories taken from the hundreds of letters she received from women every month. Her standard lecture in these days embraced a panoply of arguments for birth control—from the health, welfare, and personal rights of women and children, to the eugenic inheritance of the society, to global peace and prosperity. She typically spoke from notes, rather than a prepared text, in order to ease her nervousness in public and to allow her the flexibility to tailor her remarks to her audience. The few speeches where prepared texts or stenographic records survive have no ideological coherence but seem rather to wander among intellectual fads and fashions. In Hartford in 1923, for example, she belabored the problems posed by the feeble-minded and the mentally unfit in the country, though at the same time she condemned the racial and class overtones of eugenicism. Overreaching in her effort to establish sound scientific credentials, she spewed forth a tedious litany of statistics about infant and maternal mortality, child labor and malnutrition, linking them all to overpopulation. Several months later, before a Chicago audience filled with professionals and volunteers from the fields of social work and public health, she identified birth control as an essential, preventive social service. An undated speech of the same period, by contrast, takes its theme from the country's overriding preoccupation with business. “A new generation of young American wives, a vast majority of whom have had business experience before marriage, is beginning to approach the central problem of life—that of motherhood—in a new manner,” said Margaret. “In a word, these women are trying to put the business of bearing babies and rearing children on a basis of intelligent efficiency.” In 1928, as part of a Pacific Forum, which included her old friend Will Durant who was touting the first volume of his best-selling history-of-civilization books, she offered her audiences a choice of topics bearing on birth control—one on world population trends, another on women's rights, and a third on domestic social welfare problems.
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No matter how much she had toned herself down, Margaret remained a target of repression. Her appearances in the heavily Catholic cities of Albany, Syracuse, and Boston were either canceled or interrupted in the several years following the Town Hall raid, and these incidents sustained her image as a daring and controversial figure, always slightly on the edge of respectability. Whenever she made a public appearance in New York City, police stenographers were assigned to cover her speech, no doubt with the intent of intimidating her. When a Bronx synagogue's board of trustees banned her from its premises, the rabbi resigned in public protest, and the congregation overruled the decision. In 1929, when civic authorities in Boston intervened and refused her the right to speak at Ford Hall, she dramatically stood silent, with a band of tape across her mouth, while the Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. rose beside her and read a brief prepared statement ending in the peroration: “As a pioneer fighting for a cause, I believe in free speech. As a propagandist, I see immense advantages in being gagged. It silences me, but it makes millions of others talk and think about the cause in which I live.”

That same year, when film began to talk, and newsreels became a standard feature of the movie house, Margaret's appearance in a Fox Movietone reel aroused protest among some viewers, who thought birth control an inappropriate subject for audiences composed largely of young unmarried couples. Several of the newsreel companies capitulated to pressure brought by a Catholic voluntary association. Margaret was also kept off the airwaves until the mid-1930s, when a radio ban on discussion of the birth control controversy was lifted. Circulation-hungry newspapers, on the other hand, covered the subject with abandon, but still refused to endorse birth control outright in their editorial columns. One scion of the Gannett newspaper family admitted in a letter to Margaret that he personally supported birth control but just couldn't afford to agitate for it in his “semi-proletarian,” large-circulation newspapers. He suggested the
New York Herald Tribune
, “a staunch organ of Protestant Republicanism” as a more likely ally.
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Despite this repression—in part, perhaps, because of it—Margaret remained a popular lecturer, even as the decade's prosperity waned. She wrote proudly to Havelock Ellis in April of 1930 that in the five prior weeks she had talked to nearly 20,000 people, as she moved east from Los Angeles, through Denver, Chicago, Madison, and Minneapolis to Oberlin, Ohio, and then back again through St. Louis and Chicago and on to Washington, D.C. On that trip, she earned a standard $250 fee per lecture appearance and spent her nights shuttling between cities on railroad sleeper cars. Subsequently she was paid as high as $500, a substantial fee for the period, which more than covered her own expenses. (By way of comparison, H. G. Wells, in 1937, also earned $500 per speech.) When Margaret's voice gave out, she replenished it with a special brand of cough drop made by an old German chemist, and she took pleasure in sharing her supply with other distinguished speakers of the day.
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She seemed remarkably pliant as a public figure in these years, willing to alter her image to suit the tastes—even perhaps some of the prejudices—of her audience. To a socially respectable volunteer in the New York office, in 1925, for example, she appeared “small, quiet, elegant in a stone beige coat trimmed with black persian lamb, carrying a large patent leather pocketbook…her titian hair was straight and swathed around her head. Wideset in a small heart-shaped face, her incredibly deep blue eyes [actually, they were hazel] met the gaze of acquaintances with the steadiest, most penetrating look one has ever seen. Her voice, calm and quiet answered questions without fuss or unnecessary elaboration. A smile of greeting to those who caught her eyes, then to her own office and desk.”

This accommodating demeanor belied the far more complicated personality revealed in her journals and letters. A very different woman emerges from the private moments between the platform appearances and the organizational obligations, one who is often contemptuous of her own groveling for respectability and yearns instead for the more intense engagement of her youth. Yet without a well-defined political avenue of expression, the war in Margaret's nature between emotion and reason—between impetuosity and restraint—exhibited itself in a more subtle, and in the end a far more superficial, rebellion. She embraced wealth and privilege but continued her discreet support of radical friends and their causes. She maintained an appearance of social propriety through a second marriage, but secretly carried on passionate love affairs. Publicly, she identified herself with the increasingly rationalized world of science and medicine, but privately she maintained a fascination with the spiritual and the occult, frequently stopping between appointments to consult psychics, astrologers, and others who offered specious, but generally comforting, explanations of events and behavior she could not objectively explain.

Margaret absorbed these inherent contradictions in her life with the dry wit she took from the Irish circle of her childhood. She could be smug and self-righteous to a fault in public, but in private she was generally able to relax, to laugh at herself and at others, to appreciate human foibles and never tire of wondering at the ultimate folly of her predicament. As her days became more harried, she learned to rise early and savor her funniest observations in brief letters to scattered and often distant friends. She once wrote to Havelock Ellis from a train traveling somewhere in the Midwest, enclosing several newspaper clippings about a man with a fetish for pulling teeth. “The reporters have told me privately that they could not print all they knew about him,” she confided. “But that was the way he gets his most intense sexual satisfaction. That the thought of pulling a
woman's
teeth gives him the only
erection
he ever gets, and the actual drawing out [of] the tooth brings on the ejaculation! It was a new one on me and I pass it along to you for your archives!”

It probably wasn't easy to reconcile the free spirit that traded off-color stories with reporters with the good manners and ladylike poise that made her the heroine of some opinion makers and society matrons. Yet she also accommodated to these contradictory elements of her nature. At one point, she consulted a psychic who offered an explanation of the still unresolved tensions between impulse and reason in her life through an analysis of her astrological signs. “You have originality, both in thought and action,” she was told. “You have many of the masculine qualities of mind with a womanly heart that makes you self-reliant, gives executive ability, and the power to sacrifice yourself for others…. While you are practical, there is much of the dreamer inherent in your birth.”
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I
f the dreamer in Margaret survived through the 1920s, it was hidden from all but an intimate few. What had been an outsider's begrudging accommodation to the role of elites in accomplishing change became an insider's willful determination to manipulate the system on her own terms.

In 1922, after considerable lobbying of dubious New York State officials, Margaret incorporated the American Birth Control League in accordance with the laws governing not-for-profit charitable institutions and set out an ambitious and far-reaching declaration of intentions that included public education, legislative reform, medical research in contraception, and the actual provision of services. The league was to be a national voluntary organization headquartered in New York. It would spawn affiliates at the state and local level throughout the country, while also acting as a vehicle for Margaret's leadership aspirations on an international scale.

To manage the new enterprise, she simply expanded the board of directors and staff that she already had in place to publish the
Birth Control Review
. She took charge with the assistance of her personally loyal, if not always professionally seasoned, entourage of women, some comfortably middle-class, and others who were very well-to-do, including Juliet Rublee as vice president of the board, Frances Ackerman, a long-standing Manhattan volunteer, as treasurer, and Anne Kennedy as a paid, full-time executive director. Margaret took no salary for herself, but lived off expense money, book and lecture fees, and eventually, most of all, the generosity of her wealthy second husband, Noah Slee.

Kennedy, a capable but somewhat eccentric and emotionally erratic woman, found her way into the birth control movement after a messy divorce. Margaret's sense of mission gave renewed meaning to her life, and her devotion in return was especially intense. In their first year, Kennedy and a handful of volunteers distributed an estimated 75,000 pamphlets, more than 300,000 letters, and twelve different books about birth control, including Margaret's own. Somewhere from 15,000 to 30,000 copies of the
Birth Control Review
were printed at the highest point of its circulation, with paid subscriptions augmented by newsstand distribution and by Kitty Marion's indefatigable street sales in New York. This outreach, in turn, produced 18,000 paid memberships and an additional 132,000 inquiries by letter and phone. The budget grew to more than $38,000, and a plan of expansion was adopted that nearly doubled that amount the following year. In 1925 alone, the league's Motherhood Department answered almost 30,000 letters from women who wrote for practical advice on contraception, infertility, and a whole host of sexual problems, referring them to sympathetic local doctors where possible, or just offering words of understanding, since the mailing of practical instruction remained illegal. In some instances, volunteers, including Margaret herself, also took letters home and answered them privately, removing the organization from legal liability.
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The mail was Margaret's link to popular American culture. Thousands of the letters she received were destroyed, but surviving examples bear witness to the often tragic circumstances of women from Maine to California who were unable to find reliable contraceptive guidance. They wrote of strict and falsely modest mothers who had told them nothing of sex or birth control, of callous physicians who claimed ignorance of reliable methods, of husbands who abandoned them when they chose continence over the risk of another pregnancy, of illegal abortionists who cost them their fertility. They wrote with a sisterly affection and intimacy made possible by, distance and anonymity, often not even asking about contraception but instead confessing sexual anxieties or transgressions. A nineteen-year-old woman from Tarrant, Alabama, confided in 1924:

The overwrought letter went on to report a family history of poverty and parental abuse followed by a brief love affair with a young man named Tom whom the correspondent had met at work. He had made her pregnant, secured her an illegal abortion, and then abandoned her. The dilemma she posed for Margaret was this: should she tell a new boyfriend who wanted to marry her about this complicated—perhaps, some would say, sordid—past? Margaret wrote back immediately with enormous and respectful compassion:

Assuring the girl that no physical evidence of her prior relations was likely to be detected, she also encouraged her not to say anything if the knowledge would upset her new beau. “Keep your head high and your heart light,” the letter cautioned.

The sheer volume of this confessional correspondence testified to Margaret's continued notoriety and the extent to which her personal magnetism helped sustain the birth control cause. Just how well-known she became is impossible to measure with precision, but the mail at least confirms that substantial numbers of poor women on farms and in small towns came to identify her with their concerns. “If I could only be one part as sporty as you have been, I'd be so happy,” wrote the wife of a cotton-mill worker in Weaver, Alabama.
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In this respect, the birth control movement had a democratic impact, which its own paid constituency surely did not reflect. The typical league member was an upper-middle-class, thirty-five-year-old housewife still in her childbearing years—white, native-born, Protestant, and identified as politically “independent”—though about one fourth reported foreign-born parents. And when willing to list party affiliation, just over half said they were Republicans, while 8 percent identified themselves as Socialists, reflecting the movement's, and Margaret's own, idiosyncratic histories. Nevertheless, the
typical
female member was also married to a college graduate who earned $3,000 per year, or well above the national average, and the vast majority of the men who belonged to the organization independent of their wives (about 17 percent of the total) were identified as professionals or academics.

At first, membership accounted for up to a third of the league's total budget, and an ambitious expansion was anticipated, but the various objectives of the organization quickly came into conflict. Along with advocacy, Margaret's goal was to mobilize local groups to provide clinical birth control services throughout the country. To this end, a field operation was immediately put into place to revive dormant interest in the nine states where it had existed prior to the end of World War I. As state and local leagues flourished, however, they drained energy and money from the parent organization. Over the years, various formulas would be adopted requiring them to share a portion of their membership receipts with New York, but the tension was never fully resolved. To offset its losses in 1925, the American Birth Control League tried assembling a national council of wealthy and professionally prominent individuals. Of some 250 members, almost half were listed in
Who's Who in America
, or had spouses with that distinction, but this did not automatically translate into funding, and the national operation's growth quickly leveled off and then declined, as did that of the
Birth Control Review
.
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Organized birth control, in fact, advanced only tentatively through the 1920s with the formation of state affiliates and local clinics as its major achievement. The most substantial impact by far was made in New York City, where Margaret concentrated her personal energies and resources on the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau she founded in 1923, in an office next door to the league's. This pioneering medical facility later moved to independent space and became enormously successful, a story to which we shall return. Meanwhile, birth control organizations were, in fact, revived or begun anew outside New York through the efforts of women and social welfare activists.

In 1923 in Chicago, Rachelle Yarros, a physician and reformer who lived at Hull House and had long publicly advocated contraception, reactivated the Illinois Birth Control League, which had formed briefly after Margaret's speech at the Stockyards seven years earlier. Motivated by the extremely high incidence of illegal abortion she discovered among women in the city's Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, Dr. Yarros then opened a clinic modeled after the work of Marie Stopes in London. Her backers included a staid University of Chicago demographer by the name of James Field, and Harold and Anna Ickes, the prominent local attorney who would subsequently serve in the Roosevelt administration, and his first wife. At first they publicly disavowed Margaret, casting their lot instead with Mary Ware Dennett's organization, but after Margaret came to Chicago later that year, they changed their minds and sponsored a conference under the auspices of the American Birth Control League. This conclave was specifically targeted to social welfare groups concerned with “practical and feasible methods of decreasing dependency and delinquency.” Its stated purpose was “to seek the reduction of the burden of charities and taxation resultant from the support of the dependent and the defective classes.” Its clear intent was to distance Margaret from her former radical associations in order to make her more acceptable to new audiences like theirs.

The approach worked. Within a decade, five additional birth control facilities were operating in Chicago under Yarros's aegis, one of them at Hull House itself, and close to 22,000 indigent women had been served. All were affiliated with the American Birth Control League. The city's Jewish social service agency also opened a clinic, which gained national recognition with a program that sent visiting nurses into the homes of clients to instruct them in the use of diaphragms and other matters of sexual hygiene. By 1941, ten local facilities joined in a voluntary family planning confederation, for a brief time, calling themselves Margaret Sanger Centers, to honor the woman who had in the interim gained international acclaim, and whose name was by then thought to have substantial publicity value with the larger public.
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Similarly, birth control agitation in Los Angeles, where a local league and the nation's third clinic were founded in 1925, traced its roots to Margaret's first appearance there before the war and to the subsequent organization of a local Committee of 100 in response to the national publicity generated by Ethel Byrne's hunger strike. With the war's interference, no further birth control activity occurred for nine years, until the Los Angeles Mothers' Clinic was formed with the cooperation of the city and county boards of health, the Bureau of Charities, several medical societies and philanthropic organizations. In the still progressive political atmosphere of the west, no effective political or religious opposition materialized, and the clinic's future was secured further by a substantial endowment from a local benefactress. Even so, it still only serviced about 1,500 clients a year.

No legacy survived of Margaret's prewar activity in San Francisco, where IWW activity and anarchist agitation had been particularly virulent, but a birth control league was founded there in 1924, in response to a visit by native daughter Anne Kennedy. Efforts to start a clinic failed until 1929, when several women doctors, working at the local Children's Hospital, encouraged a group of volunteer aides to join them in offering birth control services off the premises. Their first Maternal Health Center opened in a baby clinic sponsored by the local chapter of the American Association of University Women, which, regrettably, then reneged on its offer of space in the face of protest by Catholic members. The operation moved nearby, however, and a second one was also opened in an Oakland cottage belonging to the Children's Home Society.
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The pattern was similar elsewhere. Margaret had addressed a crowded audience of about 1,000 supporters in Detroit in 1916, but the only postwar emissary of her efforts there was a local dowager named Mrs. William McGraw, who used to return from vacations in New York carrying diaphragms from the birth control offices on lower Fifth Avenue, which she then distributed to needy women from her room in an elegant local residence hotel. In this manner, she evaded federal Comstock laws prohibiting shipment by mail. Mrs. McGraw was willing to finance a clinic but was unable to find any organizational support apart from a few members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In 1926 several women active in Jewish philanthropy then raised $1,000 privately and prevailed on the local Jewish Welfare Board for an additional $3,000 to open the first birth control clinic between New York and Chicago. Several small clinics were also annexed to Detroit's two major maternity hospitals. A state group, calling itself the Michigan Maternal Health League in order to avoid some of the controversy associated with the name “birth control,” organized in 1930 and expanded in response to heavy unemployment in the automobile and steel industries during the Depression. Still, inadequate funding, timidity in the face of opposition, and difficulty in getting supplies meant that fewer than 10,000 women were reached by Michigan's affiliated birth control agencies in their first decade of operation.

In nearby Cleveland, Margaret had been the guest of Eastern European Jewish radicals when she spoke before the war. Frederick Blossom then managed to mobilize an active local birth control constituency, including establishment reformers. This coalition fell apart, however, when anarchist Ben Reitman was arrested and jailed in Cleveland in 1916 for distributing birth control fliers, and when a visit the following year by the locally bred Socialist, Rose Pastor Stokes, again stirred controversy. The intense publicity left the progressive elite quite wary of the issue, and it was not until 1923 that several young women from the local Junior League again demonstrated interest, ostensibly propelled to action by the reported suicide of an indigent mother who drowned herself in Lake Erie, rather than face another pregnancy. The Junior Leaguers then formed a deliberately cautious Maternal Health League, and five years later, after a subsequent visit to Cleveland by Margaret, they also started a clinic. Operating with referrals from the Associated Charities of Cleveland, the facility served about 1,000 women per year.
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